Home field doesn't guarantee Microsoft victory
ASPNews | at | by Mike
Despite the best efforts of Sun, Oracle and others to shift the strategic center of Internet computing to the heart of the network, it is becoming increasingly clear that the real battleground for control of the next generation of computing will take place at the periphery - which of course is the home turf of their arch-rival Microsoft.
Now that XML and related Web services standards such as SOAP are beginning to bring the vision closer to reality, we are beginning to discover the flaw in those early assumptions. It turns out that network computing is even less hierarchical than the previous client-server generation. Instead of being sucked into the center, computing is distributed more evenly throughout the network, and it makes much more sense for peripheral devices to connect to multiple resources on demand rather than tying them to a single controlling master resource.